Viewing Food Through a Kaleidoscope

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and ever eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

-Mark Twain

From "The Healing Secrets of Food" by Deborah Kesten:

Our current food worldview encourages us to look at food with binoculars. One moment we point them at protein, the next at carbohydrates, and then at fat-both in food and on our body. Viewed through such a restricted field of vision, we seed food solely from a singular, biological perspective of "isolated findings."

But toss away the binoculars and instead view food though a kaleidoscope, and the multidimensional healing secrets of socializing, feelings, mindfulness, appreciation, connection, and optimal food emerge. And then, with the simple turn of the kaleidoscope, suddenly the healing secrets are distilled into the "four facets of food" [biological, psychological, spiritual, and social nutrition]. In place of our interesting but limited binocular focus on food, stunning new nutrition insights are revealed: suddenly, subtleties that reflect physical, emotional, spiritual and social nourishment are manifested. Viewed from such an interactive, ever-changing, multifaceted vantage point, food and nutrition become integrated, interconnected, and whole.

Rather than thinking about the four facets of food as a new diet or as more dietary dogma, consider that they integrate our current nutrient-oriented view of food while also acknowledging the harder-to-measure healing dimensions of food, such as its link to emotions, spiritual well-being, and community. Once you begin to view food from this authentic, multifaceted framework, your entire relationship to food-and your perception about its power to heal holistically-will change at its core.